Thoughts about a new integrated Mozilla search
(aka Power Search)

Karsten Düsterloh <mnyromyr@tprac.de>

2004-08-17: First draft

Introduction

Currently, search in Mozilla is scattered all over the place:

• "Type-ahead-Find" lets you type in random characters for a quick search in the web page.
• "Find in Page" (CTRL-F) opens a search dialog for web page searches.

• "Keyword Search", if activated, lets you type in non-URL data into the URL bar that will be sought via the default search engine. Alternatively, you can specify special "keyword bookmarks" that get fed with this data.
• "Advanced Sidebar Search" provides a sidebar panel for searching multiple search engines at once. They even can be grouped in categories. Search results are displayed both in a detailed XUL page and a short list of titles in the sidebar panel itself. Search engines are provided by so-called search plugins based upon Apple's Sherlock 2 spec. (See http://mycroft.mozdev.org/ for the breadth of search engine selection.)
  See The Search for Mozilla - Technical Information for details on the Mozilla implementation.
• The "Bookmark Search" has its own dialog. It is available from the bookmark sidebar panel and from the bookmark manager.
• The "History Search" dialog is very similar to the bookmark search, but it is only available from the history window (CTRL-H).
• The "Advanced Address Book Search" dialog is quite sophisticated. It allows for a limited amount of logical expressions and multiple search criteria.
• The "Search Messages" dialog does resemble the advanced address book search in its capabilities, but the amount of available search criteria is much higher.
• Older versions of Mozilla provided a special integrated search dialog (let's call it "Power Search" in lack of a real name) that was availble via the Search button in the URL bar, if you set the hidden pref browser.search.powermode to 1. But this dialog is completely broken now - whether it ever was functional is still doubtful... (Also see bug 250637).

Several widgets (like the bookmarks sidebar panel or the mail thread pane) provide a "Quick Search Bar" that prefilters their current view upon their data. That feature is beyond the scope of this document.

Power Search

The discussion in and about bug 250637 revealed a common rejection of the current design of this dialog. A mere collection of several search dialogs in yet another dialog most users won't ever see anyway isn't very useful.

But how could this dialog be useful again?

• use only one page
• search multiple, different sources (internet, history, mails, etc.) simultaneously
• provide logical expressions (and, or)
• provide regular expressions [Does the backend allow this? Would it be hard to implement?]

And how could we achieve this?

• provide all search sources as searchplugins, i.e. mimic the "Advanced Sidebar Search"
• allow these searchplugins to specify which different sorts of searches they allow [including regular expressions?]
• use the general structure of the "Advanced Address Book Search" to provide (basic) logical expressions

This new dialog would/could pretty much look like the "Internet Search" tab from the broken old "Power Search", i.e. an "Advanced Sidebar Search"-like selection of search sources, an "Advanced Address Book Search"-like search term definition and a "Advanced Sidebar Search"-like results display.

Example:
"Hey, I do remember having read about that guy. But where? Did I get a mail mentioning him? Maybe it was a bugmail? Or was it a newsgroup posting? Could be even that I did visit his homepage? Ah, well, I'll just mark all these sources and let the lizard do the searching!"

Open questions

• Can we present the search results in a better way? Maybe we should present them in a new window? Or in a new tab on the search dialog?